https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-026-03854-5

Recognizing and distinguishing individual conspecifics is essential for adaptive social behavior. While sex differences in social cognition are well documented, the mechanisms underlying these differences in identity recognition remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated how the emotional valence of social interactions influences identity recognition in males and females.

Using behavioral paradigms that selectively manipulate social valence, we demonstrate that identity recognition is strongly shaped by the affective context in which social information is acquired. Males and females exhibit distinct patterns of identity recognition depending on whether prior social experiences are positive, neutral, or negative. These sex differences are not evident under neutral or positive conditions but emerge robustly when social interactions carry negative valence, indicating that emotional context is a critical determinant of social memory performance. Using a miniature microscope to image calcium signals in neurons within the dorsal hippocampus, a brain region that plays an important role in social cognition, we further identified sex differences in the neural decoding of negatively valenced social information.

Together, our findings reveal that sex differences in identity recognition are not fixed, but are dynamically gated by social valence. This work provides new insight into the organization of social memory systems and highlights the importance of considering emotional context and sex as interacting variables in studies of social cognition. These results have implications for understanding sex-biased vulnerability to neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by social recognition deficits.